Apart from the external blandishments which are portrayed in this passage, there belongs to them a power of internal deception the most fallacious and insinuating--and this not merely because of their strength, and of their fitness to engross the whole man when once they take possession of him, and so to shut out all reflection and seriousness--those counteractives to evil passions; but because of their alliance with, and the affinity which they bear to, the kindly and benevolent and good feelings of our nature. As the poet says--himself a wild and wayward, and most dangerously seductive writer--the transition is a most natural one, from "loving much to loving wrong." Let all such affections be sedulously kept at bay, and the occasions of them shunned and fled from, rather than hazarded and tampered with. Let them never be wilfully encountered, or presumptuously braved and bid defiance to, lest the victory be theirs; and no sooner do they win the heart than they war against the soul.--_Chalmers._ Verse 5. This woman not only represents the harlot and the adulteress literally, but it is also a figure of whatever seduces the soul from God, whether in morals or religion, and whether in doctrine and practice, or in religious worship.--_Wordsworth._ _Strange,_ indeed, if she alienate us from the very God that made her, and stir the jealousy of the very Being that gives us our power to love her. (Hosea ii. 8.)--_Miller._ Verse 6. God is ever at His window, His casement is always open to see what thou dost.--_Jermin._ Verse 8. Circumstances which give an occasion to sin are to be noticed and avoided. They who love danger fall into it. The youth (as verse 21 shows) did not go with the intention of defiling himself with the "strange woman," but to flatter his own vanity by seeing and talking with her, and hearing her flatteries. It is madness to play with Satan's edged tools.--_Faussett._ _The beginning of the sad end._ The loitering evening walk, the unseasonable hour (Job xxiv. 15; Rom. xiii. 12, 13); the vacant mind. "The house was empty," and therefore ready for the reception of the tempter (Matt. xii. 44, 45), and soon altogether in his possession. How valuable are self-discipline, self-control, constant employment, active energy of pursuit, as preservatives under the Divine blessing from fearful danger.--_Bridges._ Verses 7-9. The first character appears on the scene, young, "simple" in the bad sense of the word; _open_ to all impressions of evil, empty-headed and empty-hearted; lounging near the place of ill-repute, not as yet deliberately purposing to sin, but placing himself in the way of it; wandering idly to see one of whose beauty he has heard, and this at a time when the pure in heart would seek their home. It is impossible not to see a certain symbolic meaning in this picture of the gathering gloom. Night is falling over the young man's life as the shadows deepen.--_Plumptre._